Recovery

Lacking a consistent voice makes me confusing to those outside and inside of me.

At night, I often write things, whether a blog article, letter to someone, or a quick text. Sometimes I shop on Amazon while others are sleeping in my house. The difference for me is when I wake up in the morning it is a gradual unfolding of what I did the night before.

I see e-mails from Amazon alerting me to a purchase I don’t remember, and often don’t need.

I sometimes get an emergency call from my therapist before I have even awoken asking me if I am alright. That usually means some part of me has been texting or emailing her.

I almost never remember blog posts that have been written under our Mistaken Survival blog. I read them over and over, each time feeling like the first time I have read it, even though it was authored by this shared mind of mine.

I have learned to shrug and stay quiet in response to other people’s reactions to something I have done that wasn’t me. I kind of freeze because I know it was me, but it also wasn’t me. What’s the protocol for that scenario?

The mind is so adaptive. It is amazing I get through the days, but somehow I do.

It feels a lot like being lost, then found, then lost, then confused, then found, and on and on.

Unfortunately, this makes for a really spotty memory. And though I get by with the adaptive skills of my brain, it leaves me empty on the days I have the capacity to think about how little I remember about my life.

I read earlier today someone writing about how they don’t think of Dissociative Identity Disorder as a disorder at all. They see it more of a blessing and an alternative way of living.

Though I try my best to respect other’s differing opinions, it pisses me off to hear someone who has this disorder glorify it and act like it is a positive.

Here is the one true thing most people believe about DID (though not all parts inside of me agree with this opinion): if you have DID, it helped you survive as a young child when your life was so traumatic and overwhelming that your mind would not have survived otherwise.

If you truly have DID, it means there is major distress going on in your life. You can’t get the diagnosis if you are not impaired in some way.

Though I love all parts of me, even those I disagree with or can’t understand, there is nothing wonderful or great about the way we live.

I wouldn’t wish this chaos and confusion and missing life on my worst enemy. It sucks. It is not fun.

Some people describe elaborate parts who have hobbies and like to play like children. Those parts for me are hurt and damaged, and they are not having fun. They are mostly terrified every minute of their experiences.

Carrying around trauma on a daily basis and trying to survive is not fun. My life is extremely difficult, and profoundly sad due to the lack of connection I feel to the world and those in it.

This is no party. For me, it is a serious ordeal of surviving a life of torment and confusion.

I’ll let you have your opinion, and do my best to be respectful, but I can’t make that promise on a bad day.

Today, I feel no anger toward the many people who have abused me throughout life.

I know it gets complicated when it is your family, and sometimes we do weird shit to protect false ideas about our families.

But, I don’t even feel anger toward the strangers or people who mean nothing to me.

I have to think it is more about feeling anger than it is protecting the people. Maybe I am protecting myself from this anger?

It is weird to me because I have no trouble getting angry about things that happen in current day. I don’t like to hold onto anger because I think it creates toxicity in oneself to not let it go, but I do feel it is healthy to breathe anger into the situations or people that deserve our anger.

I think about my past, the people who hurt me, and I think I should feel anger toward those people who have ruined so much of my life. Internally, I feel and hear nothing. Crickets. Paralysis.

I have heard unexpressed anger turns into depression. I have tons of depression….

Living in a DID system can make the idea of trying to reach the anger feel impossible. It is kept far away from me for some reason.

Though I think I can handle the anger because my anger doesn’t scare me today, I have to believe there is some internal wisdom protecting me from this anger.

Or, maybe it is really just fear. Maybe I only think I am good with anger, and I am unknowingly terrified of the anger that must exist somewhere within me.

Maybe I don’t feel as though I deserve to be angry?

I am very in touch with my shame today, which means I feel as though I or we are bad.

After decades have gone by, I am still trying to control the abusive situations by believing they happened because I am inherently bad. I still struggle to fix this “bad” that exists within me.

When you grow up with extreme abuse and more perpetrators than you can name, it is hard not to believe it is your fault. You are the common denominator. Perpetrators even found me in adulthood, which is even harder to explain to myself.

I think of myself in terms of energy sometimes. I think of that child who attracted perpetrators. I think she must have had an energy about her that perpetrators could pick up on.

Is it wrong to be angry with yourself for putting out this energy into the world?

I think of my own daughter. I would definitely not blame her if perpetrators came into contact with her.

If she was sitting on a man’s lap and he got an erection, I would grab her off his lap and shove that man down to the ground. It would not be her fault, and I would be there to protect her.

So, why don’t I give myself the same treatment? Mostly because my parents did not value me enough to keep me safe from people and themselves.

The message they carved into my brain is that I don’t matter, and am only useful to them for their sick pleasures of torture and sex.

It’s challenging to build a healthy self after being raised with those messages.

It is incomprehensible to me how parents can treat a child the way I was treated.

I want to say it is because they were so sick, but I really still struggle every day with the idea that there is something so inherently wrong with me from the day that I was born that I deserved this.

I know I will never heal holding onto these beliefs, but how does one let go of what feels so much like their truth?

I usually have a somewhat manageable life, though still difficult for sure. I typically manage with a lot of amnesia and a balancing of the competing ideas and feelings from the other souls who reside in my body.

There are souls in my body who feel hopeless, hurt, and angry, and usually deal with those feelings by wanting to commit suicide.

Usually I can help our system of souls through these tough times, but lately it has become increasingly more difficult.

Having had the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder for 30 years, I have reached a place where the system works pretty well together on most days.

We all seem to have co-consciousness as far as I can tell, and we don’t hate each other as far as I know. I explain it this way because new souls seem to appear often in therapy. In fact, I do not even try to keep track of them, and I don’t mean any disrespect to those souls, but my mind literally cannot remember it all.

As a system, there are some rules that we agree to live by. One of the most important ones is to not kill ourselves because of the damage it would do to our children (or my children, since not everyone claims them).

We also have the rule of not committing adultery since some of us are married. Some souls don’t like this, but they have agreed to it anyway in the spirit of cooperation and living a life with less chaos.

Another rule would be that younger souls, or noticeably different acting/sounding older souls, are not to interact with the outside children in our family as I believe this would cause great harm to my children.

These rules are usually followed fairly well by most everyone in the system. Sometimes a soul might be so upset that they choose to ignore the rule about no suicide or self-harm, but we have systems in place to stop those parts from acting on these feelings, or at least minimizing the expression of them. This is something we routinely have to deal with, and something we stay hyper vigilant about.

In our 20s, we had one soul in our system who decided to quietly kill ourselves. This soul was almost successful, so it is something we are always watching out for, and thankfully, haven’t had a serious attempt since then, though we have had less serious attempts.

My system has been slapped in the face with a lot of new revelations lately, namely, it is becoming crystal clear who our family was, and the awful things they have done to us.

In the past, we have always had these memories, but what is new is the ability to start putting it together in a narrative of our lives, which means a whole lot of grief is staring us down.

Our new narrative is honest, but incredibly painful to face this truth and stay planted on earth.

This new narrative has left souls scrambling to make sense of it all. To hold the truth in our hearts and not die is quite the challenge.

Our system has become quite destabilized. We find ourselves switching from one soul to the next without any control or order to it. Our memory and executive function has dropped to whatever the lowest score would be on that scale. We can barely complete a thought in conversation without switching to another soul and then back.

We have not honored the rule of not switching souls in front of my children. I have put every last piece of energy into trying to stay present for them, but have found myself “waking up” to another soul interacting with my children. This has never happened before.

I find it difficult to complete thoughts I am trying to express, and found myself borrowing the thoughts of other souls to try to complete an idea I was speaking about. This has not worked out very well as most of us are very different from one another, and many inside have some very destructive ways of thinking.

My internal world feels like it is being obliterated, which leaves a dissociative person like myself extremely confused and barely able to function. The neat and orderly walls of our system have been something manageable for the system. But suddenly those walls don’t seem to be there so much.

My therapist pointed out the possibility that the souls within my body may be “transitioning” to a place of more wholeness (or integration), which understandably has left me completely confused and overwhelmed to suddenly be experiencing their thoughts and feelings in no particular orderly process.

I’ll be honest, this last week I have had many moments where I haven’t been coherent in what I was trying to express. I have changed the way I have sounded 5 times in a ten minute period.

In this moment of rest, I would like to be happy about this possibility of integration (yes, we are in the camp who wants it), but we are also in a state of extreme suicidal ideation, planning, and acting out. I am trying my best to stay vigilant, but I also know I don’t have the skills or the strong desire for this vigilance because of the passive influence from the other souls.

I should be in a hospital given the level of chaos and difficulty in me stopping the serious suicidal feelings and plans. I just don’t have the energy or inclination to go to a hospital.

If I go into a hospital for safety, I travel out of state to one of the few places that understands DID. I can’t just go up the road to psych hospitals in my city because they will not believe in my DID, so will more than likely shoot me up with antipsychotics to “fix” me. Not willing to do that.

When I am more of a clear thinking person, I would not risk what I am risking. I keep hoping I will wake up to a better day because I know this won’t last forever. But, I also need to keep in mind the people with DID who successfully kill themselves.

This is an evolving situation. I am hoping things become more manageable again, but not at the expense of possible progress.

I am at a place in my life when I hear another woman discuss what a wonderful mother she has, I tense up and freeze until the moment passes. My mind and body go blank.

Lately, I have described myself as feeling awkward around these situations. I don’t want to take away from someone else’s joyful relationship with their mother, but I truly cannot relate to it at all.

My mom never loved me. In fact, I think it is fair to say she hated me from the moment I was born.

I spent years and years trying to understand what was wrong with me, or what I could have done differently to have had my mother’s love.

It is so hard to sit with the idea that your own mother doesn’t have an ounce of love for you, and would in fact prefer that you be dead.

My mother loved my two older brothers, which made it even harder for me to process as a child.

On any given day my mother would show her hatred of me through her mean words or her sadistic and narcissistic behavior.

I would try so hard to be small and invisible so as to not provoke her, but it never worked.

She hated every ounce of me since the moment I was born, and maybe before.

I have known for a long time that my mother did not love me, but now I am reaching deep down inside me to face the realities of the pain and problems this has caused me throughout my life.

I struggle with loving and being loved.

It’s like the love switch is just turned off in me. I often feel like a robot, and sometimes when I do attempt love, I can get it very wrong.

As an adult, I do not long for my mother’s love. I gave up on that very early in childhood. I know who my mom is, and I want no love from her.

However, I have learned that the longing for a mother’s love does not go away.

I have tried to replace my mother’s love by unsuccessfully trying to get two different therapists to become my replacement moms. I tried to do this with therapists who have good boundaries, so it was a total flop. Plus, because I never had my mother’s love, I was clueless as to what I even wanted from these replacement moms.

People tell me the secret to recovering from this type of deep maternal wound is to parent yourself.

I still don’t have a clue as to how I would heal myself through parenting myself. I am not actually sure this is a real thing, but I have heard it enough.

For today, I will sit with the fact that my mom did not love me, it was not my fault, and it has caused me great pain and damage.

Tomorrow I will see my mom, and will lack human presence around her. I will probably have a moment of feeling sorry for her and thinking how pathetic she is. I will also feel very stressed as I secretly count the minutes until she is gone from my life again.

Even though I was raised by a horrible mom, I somehow managed to become a distant, but loyal daughter for her.

And by the grace of God, I managed to be a fairly good mom to my children, which is quite miraculous as I only had television to model good parenting for me.

I have been struggling a lot lately with the idea of naming my abusers, or even publicly claiming my abuse.

I realize I am still holding overwhelming shame and fear about the abuse I suffered. With every mention of child abuse on my Facebook page, I worry what my mother would do to me if she found out I was telling anyone. What would my oldest brother do to me who is a narcissistic, psychopath living a seemingly proper life?

I have more abusers than I could actually name if I wanted to. I did name one recently who was a very public figure, and now I am being asked to help others take him down in a very public way (he is actually dead, but still has prominence in the world). Not sure what I will do about this situation.

My abusers did a really good job in keeping me quiet. Even at my very adult age I still fear naming those I could name.

It is complicated for me. Every day it is a struggle to keep my fragile mind intact with regards to the severe trauma I endured during my childhood.

My brain was so fragile before age 11 that I truly cannot remember most of my childhood. I mostly remember snippets of abuse, but I can’t remember hardly any “normal” or good memories.

Most of my abuse happened before age 11, but still lots of abuse happened after age 11, too. Once you get branded with the invisible “V” on your forehead to let the predators out there know you are a victim, new predators can find you easily.

Because my child abuse was severe and happened when I was so young, my mind did not come together the way it should have through proper development. Instead, the trauma caused me to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which can still wreak havoc on my life today.

My mind is a jumbled mess of brokenness.

My emotions, memories, capabilities, and needs are broken into separate parts of myself. Though I can appear very strong, there are many days when I am at my breaking point and no one outside of myself even knows it.

I know I must stay functioning and strong for my children. They need me and are more important to me than anything else in this world.

Sadly, I don’t even feel a need for justice toward my perpetrators by naming them.

I barely survived my childhood, and still struggle to survive in my adult self.

Just about every kind of abuse has been done to me, including mind control. And I am weak because of this.

So, forgive me if I am not in a place to name my perpetrators. I believe I would do it if I knew of someone in imminent harm by one of these people.

Let me begin by saying I am a huge believer in the amazing benefits of neurofeedback for everyone. In fact, if you were around me daily, you would probably hear me griping about why neurofeedback is not done in every doctor and therapist office in the country, and the madness of insurance companies not wanting to pay for this very effective tool for so many ailments.

I was first introduced to neurofeedback this past Summer when I had gone to an “integrative” treatment center for trauma. As someone who was becoming more and more frustrated by the short-comings of talk-therapy alone, I was looking for something that would address the entire mind-body-spirit of my being.

I have experienced severe childhood abuse, which resulted in a lifetime of wrestling with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Depression, and Anxiety.

Many of us would like to believe that once we escaped the childhood abuse, we are free to live a happy life. What most people don’t speak about is the lifelong affects severe childhood abuse has on a person’s brain and physical health, which contributes to the lifetime of struggling with various forms of mental illness as a result.

I have been in treatment for my severe trauma on-and-off for 28 years. I think during that period most people in the field of treating trauma would agree with me that they haven’t always known what they are doing with treating trauma.

Today, so much more research has been done to show more effective ways of treating trauma. For instance, EMDR has solid research behind it as a very effective tool to help many trauma survivors process their trauma faster, which means many people are not stuck with the aftereffects of trauma for their entire life. This is huge, but not always told or offered to trauma survivors. Though, to be fair, trauma survivors are more likely to stumble across EMDR than they are neurofeedback.

If you read a lot about trauma, or are in the field, you should be aware of the cutting-edge trauma experts like Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Dan Siegel, Pat Ogden, and Stephen Porges. There are a lot of other so-called experts out there, but most of them are what I would term “old school,” as they have not embraced the significant importance of addressing the mind-body-spirit when attempting to help people with trauma. They are sticking mainly to talk-therapy only as an approach, and this is a horrible disservice to those who have been traumatized.

I live on the East Coast, and found myself not making any progress with the swamp of trauma symptoms I was stuck in while I was doing extensive talk therapy only. I decided after doing a lot of research to head to California to get help with my trauma symptoms that were so severe I wasn’t able to function in my life. I was desperate as I had been in bed for 17 months, and generally not participating in my life,

After arriving in California, I quickly had an entirely new vocabulary for trauma treatments, and I was open to just about everything. I am tempted to go into all the different therapies here, but I want to stay focused on the neurofeedback. Neurofeedback therapy for trauma survivors was a given for every therapist and good trauma treatment center I looked at on the West Coast.

Ideally, when you begin neurofeedback, you want to get a QEEG or “brain map,” which is a snapshot of your brain and how it functions over a fairly short period of time (for me, it was 40 minutes under different scenarios). This brain map is so valuable because it can be compared to what a normal functioning brain looks like, and it can also be used to show that during the brain mapping period, your brain might look similar to someone who has anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, pain, depression, etc.

In my case, my brain map looked worse than even I expected, so it was a little overwhelming to sit with the results. I had done a brain map of my son who has some attention and sensory issues, so I had an idea what it was supposed to look like. In layman’s terms. my brain showed a shit-storm of color in areas that should have shown up white, and my brain waves were extremely erratic and all over the place outside the normal range. For someone with complex-PTSD, this validates the daily symptoms we experience.

I learned a very important word called neuroplasticity, which refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize and heal itself by forming new neural pathways. This concept is so, so important to think about when looking at healing trauma.

Once my rational brain came back online, I knew I could repair much, if not all, of what was wrong with my brain through neurofeedback.

Through only 15 sessions of neurofeedback, I came out of it with some extremely important results as a trauma survivor. I don’t know how else to put it, but my mind was stronger. I was no longer depressed. I had less anxiety and an easier time going to sleep. Most importantly to my overall healing from trauma, the 15 sessions put me in a place where I could regulate my emotions better, which means I could tolerate talking about the most difficult parts of my trauma, which is something I was not able to do prior to the neurofeedback.

The inability to tolerate difficult or overwhelming emotions is probably the single biggest reason why trauma survivors stay stuck in talk therapy and don’t make the progress they need to move on with their lives. Yet, my experience in the old-school trauma circles that dominate the trauma industry is that there is almost no mention or even knowledge about the benefits of neurofeedback for trauma survivors.

If I look today at all the mainstream trauma treatment centers in the U.S., there is no place that is currently utilizing neurofeedback despite the extensive research that supports its usage. The only places that seem to offer it are the places where your insurance will not pay, and you are expected to pay out-of-pocket $40-50k per month for treatment. That’s the only way to get intensive cutting age trauma treatment at this moment.

The good news is that you can find neurofeedback offered on its own in some outpatient settings. I live in a major city, and there are probably about 14 options listed on a Google search for people to pursue neurofeedback. Typically, if you have severe trauma, you can expect to do 30-40 sessions for the neurofeedback to stick for the rest of your life.

When I returned to my home city on the East Coast, I found an excellent neurofeedback provider, and I am really looking forward to updating you on the continued results I experience to lessen my symptoms and to help my brain function the way it is intended.

My hope is that you take away from this that neurofeedback works for many, many problems people struggle with. Besides the symptoms of trauma, it has been shown to help people with ADHD, Autism, Insomnia, headaches, Anxiety, Depression, and overall improved brain performance, which is why you will hear of Olympic athletes who use neurofeedback to enhance their performance.

Neurofeedback is not new and whacky, There is lots of science to support it. Don’t expect your doctor or therapist to recommend it, because that is not likely to happen. But, if you are feeling stuck or want to get better quicker, it is a no-brainer to take advantage of neurofeedback to help heal your brain.

And if you think your brain is just fine as a trauma survivor, let me mention when I took the brain QEEG, I was feeling relaxed and nothing was bothering me too much. But, what showed up on the QEEG was a huge amount of anxiety that I am so used to experiencing everyday that it did not seem like a big deal and was unnoticed by me. This unnoticed anxiety I am used to living with has already caused me some serious health consequences.

The bottom line, if you have the means to do so, look into neurofeedback and give it a try. It is easy to do, and the results can be life-changing. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t benefit from a stronger functioning brain, even if you think you have no issues. If you have a severe trauma background, do it. It will save you years of talk therapy time and money, and will give you a better quality of life.

I often find myself in a place where I am trying to make sense why abuse has happened to me throughout my life.

It is common for abuse survivors to think about “the why.” I can get stuck in this place because I want to believe I had some control over what happened to me. In other words, if I can just figure out what I am doing to cause the abuse, I can change my behavior and it won’t happen anymore.

I struggle with the idea that there was nothing I could have done differently to stop the abuse from happening. Admitting that degree of powerlessness is extremely scary.

Instead, I struggle to accept there is no logical or spiritual reason these awful things have happened to me.

I have to accept as an adult the people who abused me were sick people, and it wasn’t my fault even as an adult. Power imbalances are still in a lot of places as an adult, and I certainly never learned as a child how to stop predators from hurting me.

You would think I would let myself off the hook for the severe abuse that happened to me as a child. Nope. I am always looking to make sense of it, wondering what I did to deserve such horrific things to happen to me.

It is especially hard to understand when I meet other adult woman around my age who haven’t suffered any abuse as a child or an adult. This knowledge does a number on my thinking, and my beliefs.

My “go to” belief about myself in trying to understand the abuse I have suffered is to believe there must have been something inherently bad about me when I was born.

My therapist often can help me pull out of that belief at least temporarily by asking me about my own children and whether they could have been born inherently bad. Knowing the innocence of a baby, I know it is not possible, except maybe in a Hollywood movie.

On a good day, I have to understand that I will probably never understand the cruelty and sickness of others, and this is probably a good thing.

Accepting that some people are just sick and twisted for their own reasons, and it isn’t going to be logical, is hard for me.

I know, on an especially good day, that both in adulthood and childhood, I did nothing to deserve the abuse from the many sick souls I encountered.

I know I am a good person. I am not perfect, but overall, I am a compassionate and loving person who carries around a lot of deep wounds underneath.

I have to stop trying to make sense of my life, and why so many people hurt me.

The logic will never explain the behavior of sadists, narcissists, and pedophiles.

I hope to one day be free of trying to take any ownership of “the why,” because no one deserves what happened to me.